so I've been catching some glimpses on the nerd-o-sphere about this new political quiz:
From the feedback I was seeing, apparently it's better than the venerable Political Compass (https://www.politicalcompass.org/), if only because it provides more granularity?
Well, aside from the fact that the political compass quiz results come in two axes and this one has *four*... I guess more is good?
In any case my results are as follows, which... I don't get it? I thought libertarianism and socialism were like... kind of opposite ends of the governmental interference spectrum?
Like, how is this thing calculated anyway? What are the possible answers? What's the underlying theory in naming these political ideologies?
luckily, this thing was hosted on Github Pages, so finding the repo was fairly straightforward. It's at https://github.com/8values/8values.github.io, of course.
And quick glance nets me this JS file with all the possible responses: https://github.com/8values/8values.github.io/blob/master/ideologies.js
dafuq is “Anarcho-Egoism”. Apparently there's a difference between Nazism, Fascism, and Capitalist Fascism. You can have Communism that is Religious.
Huh...?
@tariqk Religious communism was a pretty standard organization of Northern European and Eastern European towns during the Middle Ages. The idea that communism is inherently anti-religious is from Marx, who didn't invent, or claim to invent, the idea.
@SuzanEraslan @tariqk I'd guess they meant more like Tolstoy, but there's no way to know.
@tariqk I have no idea what they intended... these tests are always really opaque as to what the creator actually understands about political spectrums. It's very high school civics and government level understanding of politics. Like, how could you possibly get religio-communism from something with that test? All the religious questions are all anti-science and pro-war, which is not typical of religious communism as it has existed.
@SuzanEraslan I'm making grimacing expressions while strangled variants of “SEE” and “EXACTLY” are escaping my oral cavity through clenched teeth.
@tariqk also took it and honestly it feels like libertarian propaganda more than anything.
@queeractivist that's possible. but what made you feel that way? i just thought it was poorly-thought out.
@tariqk I'm not certain, and it may just be that. But defining someone who's more liberty than authority as "libertarian" seems like a serious mis-definition. I also noticed that I got that result even though that axis actually had the least strong result of the four (I had stronger results for pacifism and progress).
@queeractivist Hmm. The dev did say that they were having trouble matching ideologies. I suspect that the problem may not lie with the matching algorithm (like, seriously, it's probably just choosing the nearest point to you, that's Cartesian geometry, even if it's 4-D space), but how they've defined those ideologies in the first place. GIGO.
@SuzanEraslan Was that what the developer intended, you think?